


cat and mouse (babes week 2020)

by petrichoke



Category: Beetlejuice (1988), Beetlejuice - All Media Types
Genre: AU, Catgirl, F/M, Other tags to be added, babes week, babes week 2020, babes week drabbles, bureacracy, drabbles?, lydia is a catgirl, lydia is a medium, lydia is another ghost
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-27
Updated: 2020-07-28
Packaged: 2021-03-06 06:54:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,004
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25559167
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/petrichoke/pseuds/petrichoke
Summary: Lydia has died, and she's been sentenced to eternal catgirl-dom for the sin of being a medium when she was alive. Beetlejuice wants to "adopt" her to kick-start his acquisition of power (get back to the living world, dammit!). It's a strange AU but I hope you'll have some fun reading it!It's also a connection of all the Babes Week 2020 Drabbles :) I wanted to try making them all into one story.
Relationships: Beetlejuice/Lydia Deetz
Comments: 2
Kudos: 10
Collections: Beetlebabes Week





	cat and mouse (babes week 2020)

**Author's Note:**

> This is a first meeting :o we love stretching the prompt :')

Lydia licked at her paw. She'd been licking at her wrist and drawing the paw over her ear for a while now, and had probably swallowed quite a bit of hair. She'd have to hack up a hairball later, but there was no point in fighting the cat parts of her. It had taken her quite a while to adjust to her new body, and the quirks it demanded.

It had been countless years waiting up above, haunting the ridiculous pond where she'd drowned. She'd been young, only about sixteen, when she'd died, and she'd already known she was a medium. It had been really horrifying the first time she'd seen the specter of some woman in a terrifically old-fashioned dress wafting about aimlessly in a house she'd been invited to, and now she was to be punished for all eternity for a tiny quirk which she'd been able to make no real use of during her short and, frankly, ineffectual life.

After her death, Lydia had sat down on the sandy bank of the pond and waited for a very, very long time, watching saplings grow into trees and boulders crumble into sand. She was deeply surprised when suddenly the ground had fallen out from underneath her and she had tumbled down a long chute into a funny room full of other dead people. She walked past the mishmash of chairs lining the walls, ignoring a man with his head caved in and wriggling with maggots and a trio of people with instruments all mashed into each other, one breathing huskily through a wheezing harmonica. The other people in the room were also macabre, all bearing the strange marks of their deaths, and some bearing marks which were clearly unrelated. One person was bright purple. It made no sense. Lydia walked to the end of the room, where she stood, dripping dark water into a puddle on the floor.

Lydia's body hadn't been embalmed or even found in the week or so it takes a soul to compose itself after death. When she'd appeared next to her watery tomb she'd still been clad in her white dress, her hair up in bedraggled dark curls tied with a blue silk ribbon. She was, however, soaked to the bone. She dripped ectoplasmic water wherever she went, though thankfully it never seemed to collect into any pool larger than about a foot in diameter, but it was still annoying to feel so damp and cold all of the time. She was filled to the brim with water, her voice a deep murky burble and her ability to breathe nonexistent. It had been a long couple of months before she'd managed to quell her instinctive urge to try (painfully) to draw air into shriveled, waterlogged lungs.

She didn't think to try to speak to the green receptionist. Instead she simply made a wet questioning noise. The receptionist blinked sarcastically at her and pointed a long painted nail at a roll of tickets in a metal holder. Lydia took one. It read "1,631". She looked up at the number on the flashing box (screen) above the receptionist's window. It was "897".

She shrugged and turned slowly to sit down in a flimsy chair. There was a magazine on the table next to her, and she picked it up, trying vaguely to enjoy the pictures and to piece together the stories. The world had clearly changed a great deal in the time she'd sat and waited. The book had said it would be 125 years in her haunt, and if it had been it was now 1990 or so.

Lydia was quite good at waiting by now. She sat and let the hours and days and weeks tick by until her number was called, upon which she shuffled through the strange smooth white door into a small smoky room. A woman in a tight grey suit was sitting at a desk which filled most of the room, smoking a neatly rolled cigarette. When she looked at Lydia and exhaled, the smoke poured out from her mouth and the slit in her neck at the same time. It conveyed a deep sense of exhaustion. Looking at all of the paper stacked around the room, Lydia understood that this woman was some kind of manager. Why was she here?

"Sit down, girl, sit down. Don't just stand there like an idiot. I am Juno, your caseworker." The woman was suddenly snapping brisk words at her, grabbing a sheaf of papers from her messy desk and rifling through them.

Lydia sat in another flimsy chair in front of the desk. The woman -- Juno -- was still talking.

"... since you're a medium. It will be permanent. Since this will mean some significant changes to your soul, you will no longer be able to be classified as a class D ghoul or above and you will therefore need to be placed with an appropriate supervisor. Since the department does not provide this service you will be given thirty days in a center for ghoul adoption and will be given to whoever meets the criteria for guardianship. In this case it will be someone who can pay the fee for someone of your caliber. They will also need to be at least a class C poltergeist. Finally, they will need to be approved by you and by the center's manager. This will necessitate a series of meetings with you and any interested party. You are required to attend these meetings for a minimum of three minutes, after which either party in the meeting can end the meeting at any time. Got that?"

Lydia stared at her. She had not gotten that.

"It will all be in this book." She handed a thick hardcover book to Lydia. It was entitled _Handbook for Deceased Mediums_. “Once you exit through the door the punishment will be in effect. Your temporary supervisor will meet you outside and escort you to the center where you will remain until you are adopted.”

Lydia leafed through the book. It was written in a very small print, with lines spaced close together. It looked almost impossibly dense. How could she read this all, especially in under thirty days?

Juno waved her hands towards the door. “Go on, girl, get out of here.”

Lydia didn’t see any point in staying here any longer, so she got up and left through the door. She hadn’t said a single word to Juno the entire time, and the implications of what she had been told still had not penetrated her waterlogged mind. It was therefore quite a shock when she stepped through the door and a charge passed through her, transforming her entire body.

She was now some strange cat-girl amalgamation: no longer wet, now wearing some kind of short regulation canvas dress. Her bare feet and hands were now paws, covered with black fur which bled up her forearms, fading out by the time it reached her elbows. She lifted a paw to her face and found that she had cat ears, and whiskers. Her hair had been cut tightly to her head in some kind of buzz cut -- or maybe it was fur? She stumbled and counter-balanced with a tail. She had a tail! Something had changed about her eyes too: she was now nearsighted, and colorblind, or close enough, as the world was awash in blues and greys. It was harder to pick things up, somehow, though when someone moved next to her, her eyes were drawn to them instantly. She shot her head to the side to stare wide-eyed at the person next to her. They were tall, with horns curling out from the sides of their head like a goat’s. They wore a deep blue suit. She could see a long tail with a curly tuft of hair on the end of it lashing behind them.

“Ready to go, Miss Deetz?” they asked. 

Lydia, carefully balancing the book between thumbless paws, nodded.

She had ended up here, in what was essentially an apartment building filled with other low-level un-people up for adoption. She sometimes got to see them through her window, and they were varied and interesting: a few were animal-blends like her, but she had never seen another cat-person, and many more had marks of other-ness which had nothing to do with animals. They were two feet tall, or seven, or they had tools for hands or other things Lydia could see would be useful in different types of labor. It made Lydia wonder how your changes were selected. Did they have to do with your death? Or your life? Or were some chosen by the souls themselves?

Most of the time Lydia simply sat in her rooms. She had three: a bedroom, a bathroom, and a living room. She found her first bath simultaneously pleasant and unpleasant: the warmth of the water soothing her human part, which had been so cold and wet for so long that it had almost forgotten what it was like to be dry and clean and warm, and her cat part yowling in indignation at the sensation of water on fur. It knew that you should only bathe yourself with your tongue. That was what was proper and correct for a cat. She found that her cat nature made many things more difficult, the longer she settled into this body.

Very few people came to see her. She guessed that either people didn’t want to take a catgirl or maybe she was too expensive, or maybe the qualifications were too high. Lydia hadn’t liked any of the ones who’d come anyway, and had sent them away. She was getting worried -- the days were ticking by and all she could do was half-sleep on the bed or the couch in the living room. That was somewhat more interesting, since she could look out the window into the hallway, and if the goat-person knocked on the door she could quickly be in place at the table to talk to the newest person who wanted to own her. Or whatever it was called.

She couldn’t even read the book. Her eyes had trouble focusing enough to read the small print, and without thumbs it was almost impossible to turn the pages. She could manage some things with her small raspy tongue (yet another stupid change) but turning pages was so imprecise and the book was so wordy and unhelpful that Lydia gave it up as a bad job. What happened would happen anyway, regardless of whether or not she read the book, so there was no point in torturing herself over it.

So Lydia sat, cleaning her ears. It was her twenty-seventh day in the facility, announced the clock on the wall, and someone knocked on the door.

“Lydia,” said the goat-person through the door. “It’s another potential supervisor.”

Lydia knew the drill by now. She got up, slunk over to one of the two chairs by the table, and sat, paws placed neatly on the flimsy plastic of the table, and watched the door like a hawk. Her tail swished slowly from side to side behind her. 

A man stepped through the door, almost filling the room with a blast of personality Lydia imagined she could feel ruffling the fur across the top of her head. He had crazy hair sticking out in all directions (he looked somewhat fried -- perhaps he had been electrocuted?) and he wore a strange, ill-fitting suit with stripes in a dark color. He had some kind of growth on his face. Lichen? Mold? Moss? Lydia couldn’t see well enough to be sure. He smiled at her with many, many teeth and held out his arms, presenting himself like a showman.

“Hey, babes,” he said, in a guttural voice. It sounded like it was pretty difficult for him to speak. It rasped and husked and did all those things voices do when you have something terrifically wrong with your throat. “Let’s talk business.”


End file.
